Expedition Oymyakon 2008 - The Cold Pole

We are a Swedish team consisting of particle physicist and former polar traveller André Grisell and geography teacher and field photographer Mikael Lundgren. We travelled to Oymyakon - The Cold Pole in December 2008 - January 2009. The purpose of our Oymyakon 2008/09 expedition was environmental studies in extreme low temperatures, photographic art and Swedish-Russian relationships. Among other things we visited the aerological station and the monument of cold in Oymyakon.

On this site we wrote reports from our travels and published pictures. The journey began during christmas 2008 when we flew from Stockholm Arlanda to Moscow and from there eastwards towards Yakutsk.

On the Expedition log page you find what we wrote during the journey. Soon a full report will show up on this page. It is possible to leave comments on what we write directly under the Expeditions log as it is written like a blog. Pictures can be found in the photo gallery section. Feel free to leave us messages in our guestbook. We will reply as soon as we can and are able to.

About Oymyakon

Stockholm

Moscow

Oymyakon

Oymyakon is a village in Russian Siberia located along the Indigirka river, about 800 km north east of Yakutsk. The climate in the region is continental with very cold winters. The village is one of the candidates to be the northern pole of cold. The record for Oymyakon is - 71,2 degrees Celsius, the lowest recorded temperature for any permanently inhabited place on earth. Only Antarctica has recorded lower temperatures. The village is located 690 meters above sea level and lies in a valley between two mountain ranges. This is the reason that temperatures drops to extremely low levels. The name Oymyakon means "non-freezing water" because of the natural hot spring close to the village.

We will be travelling on the Kolyma Highway also known as "The road of bones" which connects Magadan with the northern lands. The road was constructed during the Stalin era of the Soviet union and it was built by prisoners from Sevvostlag labor camp and from Gulag camps. The bones of the people who died during the construction of the road were laid beneath or around the road. There is a saying because of all the dead bodies - a log and a bone, a log and a bone.